Ro Khanna was first elected as a whiz kid evangelist for Silicon Valley, the heart of his congressional district and home to Apple, Cisco and Intel’s headquarters. Today, though, the Californian's stumping for a different crowd.
The average voter in Ohio might have no idea who he is — he’s working on that — but Khanna’s angling to be the Democratic Party’s forward-facing industrialist, revitalizing manufacturing across forgotten swaths of the heartland all with an eye toward higher office.
With the public souring on Big Tech and President Joe Biden popularizing a "Made in America" agenda, Khanna is seizing on last year’s Chips Act, a massive bipartisan achievement that dedicates around $50 billion to making computer chips at home to reverse decades of production in Asia. The Bernie Sanders acolyte wants to replicate that formula in sectors like textiles, steel and offshore wind, pitching a "new economic patriotism" that he estimates will cost $2 trillion over 10 years.
